Listen to Episode 219 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts!
Today, the dry land of North America and Asia are just barely separated by ocean, but in the past, the region between the continents has provided home and passage to a wide variety of plants and animals. This episode, we explore the deep history of Beringia.
Listen to Episode 204 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts!
Six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea dried up, wreaking havoc on marine life and leaving an incredible legacy in the geologic record. This episode, we tackle the Messinian Salinity Crisis.
Listen to Episode 174 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts!
The seas of the Paleozoic Era were quite different from today, and between them, there was a great ecological transition. This episode, we discuss the complexities, mysteries, and lasting impacts of the Mesozoic Marine Revolution.
Listen to Episode 171 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts!
As the world’s continents have shifted and changed shape over time, so have the oceans. This episode, we discuss the history and study of the various iterations of one of Earth’s most famous ancient body of water: The Tethys Sea.
Listen to Episode 164 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts!
Earth’s deep history is filled with dramatic cases of changing climates, shifting continents, and evolutionary leaps and bounds, but between roughly 1.8 and 0.8 billion years ago, things were seemingly stable. This episode, we explore the many mysteries of the so-called “Boring Billion.”
Listen to Episode 124 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or anywhere you can find it!
An Earth covered in ice might sound far-fetched, but there is enough evidence in the geologic record and climate modeling for Earth scientists to suspect this has actually happened in our planet’s past – more than once. This episode, we discuss the origins, evidence, and much-debated questions surrounding the hypothesis of Snowball Earth.
Listen to Episode 122 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you feel like it!
The Earth is in motion beneath our feet, and this motion impacts nearly every feature and activity on the planet’s surface. And yet, we’ve only recently come to understand this central geological phenomenon. This episode, we discuss the scientific history and the deep history of Plate Tectonics.
Listen to Episode 103 on PodBean, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you can find it!
It’s been called the largest natural climate event of the Cenozoic Era, it set off a series of environmental changes that paved the way for our modern world, and it’s a critical case study in what happens when a huge rise in atmospheric Carbon triggers rapid warming of the global climate. This episode, we discuss the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
Listen to Episode 100 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you can find it!
As far as we can tell, all life on Earth is descended from a common ancestry. But there are so many open questions about when, where, and how life got started. In this episode, we tackle some of the biggest questions in the universe as we discuss The Origin of Life.
Listen to Episode 75 on PodBean, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast place!
The history of life on Earth is marked by tragedy. Life as we know it only exists because more ancient life lost the fight for survival. In this episode, we discuss the most mysterious – and possibly the most tragic – extinction event in Earth history, the most important transformation our planet has experienced since its formation: the Great Oxidation Event.
The Common Descent Podcast 